Slashdot

I had an intellectual argument with a good friend yesterday, and I was pretty sure I was right, even after 3 rounds of debate, so I thought I would write a journal entry about it.

I was arguing that is was simply impossible to know if you found "the one" after dating for three weeks. My premise is that if you only know someone three weeks, you really haven't gotten to know them, and the emotional force of immediate love (Love at first site) hasn't worn off. After 6 months for example, you would be able to know alot more about the character of the person you are dating, though I personally wouldn't do with less than a full year.

I also supposed that those that get married after dating 3 weeks would be a great deal more likely to break up sooner than those who dated for longer (like 6 months). If the odds of success are so much poorer in the first group than the second, and there is no way to know if you are a case of the rule or the exception, it just seems to be a lot smarter to wait longer than 3 weeks, in order to increase the odds your relationship will last.

This all assumes of course that your goal in marriage is for a life long commitment. If you want to know if you can be happy living with someone for 50 years, it would seem a lot more logically sound to date for a period of time to gain a representative sample of what that person is like in different moods and how they deal with conflict and things like that. 3 weeks isn't a big enough sample. 6 months is a better sample. With a year long sample, you have seen a person at all seasons of the year, and know how they deal with life.

Does this mean I was right? Here is my prediction of the web of trust system that has come about.

So, now I can individually add pluses and minuses to each of these catagories:

Friend
Fan
Foe
Freak
Friends of Friends
Foes of Friends

So, I am thinging about how to assign this new found power? Any thoughts on this?

Yea, I have mod access. I am at school now (which is why my journal hasn't been updated in a while...Clemson University, in case you are interested.

Anyway, reply with the link to a post you think should be modded up, and I will mod it up. Yea. Perhaps we can slightly make the system better. First come, first served. Of course, Fort Knox gets one at least, even if he doen't make it first :)

This was a spur of the moment idea, but it sounded like it could be useful on slashdot, so feel free to share your opinion.

I like the friends/foe system, because it gives me the chance to read some of the fine journal entries some of you put out. But I was wondering...there are half a million slashdot users, how can I find people's journals I like?

Right now, it is hit-or-miss. I see a comment I think is really good, and add that person as my friend. But what if I think they are REALLY insightful? What about THEIR friends? Hey, if I like the style of writing of one guy, and he likes some other guys, maybe I will like them too.

So, how about a web of trust type system? Journals from people who are my friends would gain a point in my fan's account (see, my fans are trusting my friends). Now, for any given user, take all their friends, find all their fans, and give them a point. Users can sort by most points, and thereby would be exposed to users that are like-minded. This process could also be done recursively, perhaps to a certain number of levels. Also, you could use the foe/freak system to automatically downgrade certain users.

If this could be implemented, the result would be cliques. People would start to segment into groups, which could be a good thing. You could probably map these groups, and you could also find out which user in any group was the most popular. So, a new slashdotter would be able to tell the flavor of the group by the writings of its most popular members, and decide if they want to join.

I am proposing an automated faction system using the foe/friend/freak/fan designation to automatically correlate people. Of course, it is all optional. You could stay independent. You could manually choose people you wanted. This is sort of like Tivo for slashdot. Slashdot would merely suggest other users you would find interesting based on the information collected thus far. I think the idea is intriguing.

Well, it probably would never happen because it would be so hard to code and implement, but I thought it was a fun idea. After all, who knows what other users are out there that I might like to read?

One of the minor things that annoys me is that when you post anonymously, you do not get messaged when someone replies to your message. If I post a reply normally, my preferences are set to message me with replies. But anonymous messages lose this preference.

I wish there was a way to post with a "Slashdot remember me, everyone else forget me" option, so that I can track my anonymous postings. Sometimes, I coward out, but I still want to hear what people have to say. I guess I could go back and check it manually, but most of the time I forget what I posted where.

What do you think? Do you think this idea is good? Can it be implimented?